Girl played dead to survive school shooting

A six-year-old girl who survived the carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary by pretending to be dead told her mother that she was fine but all her friends had been killed.

Newtown pastor Jim Solomon, who counselled the grade-one student's mother, told ABC News the girl was the sole survivor from her class and was "covered in blood from head to toe" when she emerged from the Connecticut school.

"Mummy, I’m okay, but all my friends are dead," the girl said, according to Solomon.

The pastor said the girl described the gunman as someone who was "angry" and "very mad".

Lanza killed 20 students in two classrooms as well as six adults before turning the gun on himself as police arrived on Friday morning.

Earlier he had killed his mother at their Newtown home.

Heart-rending funerals have been held for two six-year-old boys, as America begins to farewell the 20 children slain.

The full picture of the horror and heroism in the school, where the shooter, Adam Lanza, sprayed bullets into two rooms, is starting to emerge.

The husband of Dawn Hochsprung, the slain school principal, said she had told others around her to hide.

Then she "and at least one other teacher went out and actually tried to subdue the killer."

"I don't know where that comes from. Dawn was 5'2"," he said.

One of the teachers, Janet Balmer, told CNN how when she heard gunshots, she followed the lockdown routine the school had recently practiced, then tried to act in front of her five-year-old charges as if all was well.

"We sat in the cubby away from the door so no one could see us, read them a story and talked to them," she said.

After agonising minutes, police knocked at the door and told the children to leave and to "cover their eyes" to avoid being exposed to the gore.

No information about a possible motive, or whether Lanza had any diagnosed mental condition, has emerged.